Byron: Hi, my name’s Byron Hebert and this is another quick Tool Time update brought to you by The Entrepreneur’s Playbook and your friends at PKF Texas. What I want to talk to you about today is time and the most precious resource you have. We all have the same amount of time, but how we use that time is critical So, Steven Covey came up with the four quadrants of time management and you can see on this upper axis we’ve got “Urgent” and “Not Urgent” and over here we have “Important” and “Not Important”. So, in quadrant one is items that are urgent and important. That is the necessity quadrant.

That’s where we spend most of our time. That’s urgent things that come up that we have to do – deadlines and things like that. This quadrant here where is “Not Important” but “Urgent” is the quadrant of deception. This is time where we spend a lot of time but really, we feel like things are urgent but they’re really not that important – things like some phone calls, emails, things like that. Over herein this quadrant where the quadrant of “Not Important” and “Not Urgent” is the waste. We spend a lot of time – waste a lot of times sometimes on things that we – that are really not urgent or not important. Now, this quadrant is the quadrant of quality – “Not Urgent” but “Important”. This is where we think of things like strategy, training, family time.

This is where we want to focus a little bit more time. Keep out of the quadrant of deception, the quadrant of waste and look to spend more time in the quality of quadrant. Now, how do you do that? This is a good time of year to reassess the things that you do every day. Think of the 80/20 rule. 20 percent of the things you do add 80 percent of the value to your company, so focus on those areas. Think of the other 80 percent. What are you doing that doesn’t add value to your company or to your life? And of those things, you want to try to eliminate it. You either get rid of them, or delegate them to somebody else. So, again, you want to stay out of these quadrants, focus more on this quadrant – quadrant of quality – to improve your life and improve your company. Thank you. This is Byron Hebert. This has been another quick Tool Time update brought to you by your friends at PKF Texas and The Entrepreneur’s Playbook.